This article examines the representational preferences of the represented, a perspective which has been largely neglected by political scientists in Canada. Using focus group interviews, I assess views of representation among three visible minority communities—black, South Asian and Chinese—within the urban and highly diverse setting of the Greater Toronto Area. Applying Hanna Pitkin's classic conceptual framework, I probe the multiple dimensions of political representation, examining the relative importance of its formal, descriptive, substantive and symbolic elements from minorities' perspective. Drawing on more recent advances in representational theory, I examine how minorities evaluate political actors' claims to represent them, and look at the “mobilizing objections” citizens raise in the face of such claims. Finally, I compare the three communities to assess similarities and differences in perceptions of representation along its various dimensions.

This paper examines public attitudes towards aboriginal policy in Canada, focusing on evidence from two surveys conducted in Saskatchewan, a province with a large and growing Aboriginal population. We show that although non-Aboriginals are collectively divided on Aboriginal public policies, expressing considerable support for some, but strong reservations when it comes to others; the individual-level evidence indicates that there is a single Aboriginal policy agenda in the minds of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Support for, and opposition to, the privileging of Aboriginal claims is structured in part by prejudice toward outgroups but also by non-Aboriginal people's more general position on the role of government in society. Moreover, the impact of positions about the role of government in society on attitudes toward Aboriginal policies is moderated by people's level of political sophistication: the more educated and politically interested they are, the greater the impact of those ideological views.

There is a considerable amount of research about racial affinity effects, that voters are likely to support a candidate of the same race. However, it is unclear it this applies only to candidates of the voters' specific ethnocultural group or to racialized candidates in general. Previous research suggests that the prospects for “rainbow coalitions” on the basis of group identities are poor; indeed, findings of inter-minority conflict are common. This study uses new data from a web-based survey experiment with a large panel of racialized respondents. Respondents evaluated fictional candidates with the ethnicity of the candidates experimentally manipulated. While respondents show strong affinity for their own ethnocultural group, they also show some affinity for other minority candidates and certainly no inter-minority conflict. Effects are strongly conditional on the degree of ethnic self-identity. “Rainbow coalitions” may be more likely than previous research suggests.

Despite an extensive dialogue on the subject of immigration, there has been little systematic cross-national investigation into the framing of immigration in the news media. Understanding the evolution of frames is an important piece of how we conceive of the link between the public's political priorities and policy makers’ responses. While the multi-directional relationships that exist between media, public policy and public opinion often pose challenges to precisely extracting media effects, there is still much that can be said about how the content and tone of immigration frames change over time in response to major policy changes or focusing events. Using automated content analysis (ACA) of print news data from Canada and Britain, I examine immigration framing from 1999 to 2013, identifying immigration-related frames in print news coverage and identifying trends in the volume and tone of frames over time. Results offer insight into striking commonalities in the frames used by each country's print media, and the divergent evolution in the emphasis on certain frames over others, largely predicated on coverage of focusing events.

Does national identity necessarily have exclusionary effects when it comes to immigration attitudes or is it possible that some national identities act as inclusive forces? While research in Europe and in the US points to the former, one of the long-standing explanations for Canada's success with immigration has been the central place played by immigration and multiculturalism in its national identity. Using the Canadian case, this research tests the possibility that some national identities might represent an inclusive force. It does so through a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 1500) where respondents' national identity was primed before answering questions on immigration and multiculturalism. The analysis shows that contrary to previous results obtained in the Netherlands, priming Canadian identity does not increase anti-immigration attitudes. A new prime designed to isolate the effect of national identity even decreased these exclusionary attitudes.

This article has two objectives. The first is to highlight a turn towards multilateral collaboration in the immigration sector and the resulting focus on pan-Canadian policy objectives and initiatives. This account is set against the current literature, which argues a bilateral approach to intergovernmental relations in the sector has resulted in asymmetrical policies and programs. The second objective is to demonstrate the value of explicitly focusing on the nature of intergovernmental relations as unilateral, bilateral or multilateral. Applying this lens, the article draws out the drivers and complexity of the turn towards multilateral collaboration in the immigration sector, arguing it is motivated by an increased provincial engagement in economic immigration and also by the federal government's desire to reassert its own role in response.

Usually, the state of urban research in Canadian political science leads to pessimistic evaluations. This pessimism is belied by one emerging area of study: research on Canadian municipal public policies and immigration, which has flourished over the last 20 years. This article tracks the evolution of this research. First, I retrace how municipal policies for immigrants have been studied, and show how comparison is a central component of this literature. Second, I analyze the dynamics of agenda setting, as well as variables for decision making and implementation. Third, I make three propositions for future research, which are i) to examine the reciprocal relationship between attitudes towards immigration and local public policies and politics; ii) to study local public policy as constructions rather than responses and iii) to revisit the use of national models of integration for cities. In conclusion, I underline the positive outcomes of “bringing cities back in” to Canadian political science, not only to better understand political regulation and Canadian federalism, but also to have a more complete view of the immigrant integration policies.

Western powers have created a wide range of military networks whose operating modes remain largely unknown to us. While the subfield of International Relations debates the ability of networks to generate convergence, this article addresses this debate with a longitudinal study of one such military network: the Multinational Interoperability Council (MIC). Our analysis reveals that, despite limited resources and influence, members of the MIC produce an identity, norms and capabilities for collective action that are specific to the network. They are able to mobilise them strategically in order to produce soft convergence in the area of military coalition building.

Although ministerial political advisors are prominent and influential actors within the core executive in Canada and elsewhere, information is scarce with respect to their personal and professional backgrounds and career trajectory. This article uses recent survey data and publicly available biographical information to analyse the demographic composition of senior ministerial policy advisors within the Government of Canada. It finds that, while ministerial policy staffers are young and politically committed, they are not so young nor so professionally inexperienced as sometimes thought. Nor are they always personally and tightly bound to their current ministers but often work for different ministers in different departments. This suggests that advisors are agents of the whole government as much as agents of their individual ministers and raises questions about the degree to which they are responsive to the Prime Minister's Office, thereby increasing centralization.